Annunciation
You have to believe this gospel is man-made,
the oil paint luminous as pain,
the angel dressed in blood red.
No woman would frame this sacred moment
inside a gilded trap so garish and so public.
No woman gestates willfully
the glory of certain death.
Here is sacrifice forced upon her,
the rapturous horn-blast
boggling the brainstem into panic,
a consecration, a conscription.
Against your will you must imagine
the mother who can’t stop imagining the tank,
against all odds blown over on its side,
the undercarriage a cavity,
the manufactured shell of steel
a caved-in womb, a tomb.
It’s a man of glory who comes knocking
to inform each mother too late
about the end of time
she carried once
inside her body like a bomb.